The Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Louise Glück



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Once again, the Swedish Academy deceived the literary world and pulled a fairly well-known author out of its hat. Once again, he fails to reflect the diversity of the literary work with his decisions.

American Louise Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

American Louise Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Swedish Academy

The award is received by the American poet Louise Glück, which is endowed with ten million Swedish crowns (about one million Swiss francs). This was announced by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on Thursday. A total of 197 candidates were nominated for the award. Glück, 77, will be honored “for her unmistakable poetic voice,” with which she “makes individual existence universal with strict beauty,” Academy permanent secretary Mats Malm said at the announcement in Stockholm.

Louise Glück was born in New York in 1943 and grew up as the daughter of an entrepreneur and homemaker in New York. His paternal grandparents were Jews who immigrated from Hungary. As a child, Glück suffered from eating disorders. He studied literature at Columbia University and later taught at several universities, including a. at Yale University. According to the Swedish Academy, he now lives in the US state of Massachusetts.

He has published volumes of poetry since the late 1960s. For the 1992 volume “The Wild Iris” he received the Pulitzer Prize. In it, he lets both animate and inanimate nature have their own voice and speak to readers. In 2003 Louise Glück was named Poet Laureate of the United States, which is a prestigious position that changes annually. She is one of the most important poets in the United States.

In the pain zones of existence

Louise Glück has repeatedly grouped her poetry collections around central themes and in them she formed existential questions such as loneliness, the relationship between nature and man, the finiteness of existence with lucid images and a sober language in verse. In his poems he always looks for the painful areas of existence.

The two volumes “Averno” and “Wilde Iris” were published in German translation in 2007 and 2008 by Luchterhand-Verlag. Both volumes were translated by the German poet Ulrike Draesner. They are out of stock and currently not available in bookstores.

Although Louise Glück has been marketed as an insider here and there, very few literary experts expected this option. One would have expected Canadian Margaret Atwood or French-speaking writer Maryse Condé de Guadalupe to be honored. The Swedish Academy has once again surprised the literary world with an unusual decision.

Provocatively indifferent decision

Without wanting to downplay the work and importance of Louise Glück, it must be said, however, that the Swedish Academy, after all the turbulence of recent years and also the controversial decision last year, once again lost the opportunity to give a clear example. . In any case, the diversity of world literature is not adequately reflected in the list of the youngest Nobel Prize winners.

After Bob Dylan, an American singer-songwriter, was honored in 2016, one could have imagined a winner from another part of the world. How little the Swedish Academy cares for such considerations can be seen in the almost provocative nonchalance with which it now honors the poet Louise Glück, who is highly respected in America, but otherwise far from known, with the Prize. Nobel.

Between life and death

Among the most popular motifs in Louise Glück’s poetic work are ancient myths, in which she reflects the human condition and therefore constantly re-examines the interpretive potential of classical materials. Especially in his volume of poems “Averno” virtuously intertwines antiquity and the present. The title refers to the crater lake Avernus in the Phlegrean Fields, which was considered one of the gateways to the underworld from ancient times to the Middle Ages.

On this threshold between death and life, which is emblematic of all existing transitions, the poems unfold their inner tension by illuminating the confusion of existence in all directions. “Death cannot hurt me more / than you have hurt me / my beloved life,” he says in one of the poems, which banishes the fear of finitude with the horrors of existence in a bold and fearless way, almost paradoxical.

Each of his books, Louise Glück once said, was different from the one before. It was always an adventure, as if it was something I had never done before. This is how you must feel when you write. He is not interested in polishing the monument. However, at the same time, she is also an expert in silence. Again and again he experienced these periods of excruciating calm, during which he was unable to write.

Two Nobel laureates last year

Last year, the Academy chose two winners because the 2018 Literature Prize was canceled due to a scandal involving former academic Katarina Frostenson and her husband Jean-Claude Arnault. Subsequently, the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk received the 2018 award. The 2019 award went to Austrian Peter Handke and provoked applause, consternation and protests.

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Sunday, October 25, 2020, 11:00 am, NZZ lobby, Zurich
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